Stamina as a Guardian

To start off I would like to admit, that I never really did raid in Cataclysm.
The expansion was not to my liking, so I skipped most of it, raided through TBC & WotLK on my Horde tanking druid.
Now that I've returned for MoP, I thought to myself i had to learn my class, from scratch. So I leveled a new druid, an Alliance one.
I reach max level and there we are, back to tanking heroics, which I actually enjoy.
The only thing that bothers me, is that every site I look at, every guide i go through, every gear optimizer is asking me to do something that I preferably wouldn't wanna do if it was up to me.
I feel that we have gotten alot less HP as druid tanks, in previous expansions we we're without a doubt the class with the most HP in bear form.
So my frustration doesn't go out to having to gem/enchant for dodge/agi, but goes out to the lack of being able to gem/enchant for stamina.
Seeing all kinds of classes have alot more HP than me is really annoying seeing that I like high numbers.

eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/sylvanas/Alchel/simple

TL;DR: Why do Guardians not have huge healthpools anymore? :'(

PS. This a new mmo-champ account since I was on a 1 year break from like... Everything. Glad to be back 8|

Another reason for bears not having enormous health pools anymore is a fundamental change in the thought process behind their tanking abilities. In early WoW, the thought process behind bears was that they would tank primarily through armor and health pool, greater avoidance abilities not being part of their paradigm. Now, Blizzard has decided that they want to, to use the previous poster's jargon, homogenize the tanking experience, so druids have many more active and passive mitigation/avoidance abilities.

That said, stamina is back to having a huge effect on druids. I run a guardian bear and I gemmed everything agi agi agi last expansion, but stamina (and pure defense stats because of the gem change) is back to being king.

So what you guys are telling me is that I should look past the gear optimizers and just use my common sense, and you are giving me permission to actually gem/enchant for stamina?? That would be soooo awesome.

the current state of bear is that we avoid damage with dodoge rating, and migrate damage with mastery, and survive damage with stamina

dodge will make you take less melee damage in a fight
mastery wil make you take less melee damage in fight
stamina works on both melee and spell damamge

so for tankking caster like bosses stamina is defently king, when taking melee bosses dodge and then mastery are better. however and here comes the real issue with bears
we have savage defence that gives us + 45% dodge for 6 seconds on a 9 second cooldown.
that means during the remaining 3 seconds we have with almost no avoidence at all, for those seconds mainly stamina will help you survive

thats why stamina is the best primairy stats but for secondairy stats you want dodge or mastery
for gems you want to use secondairy stat gems, dodge or mastery
for enchants, enchant mastery and stamina in the places where you cant get mastery

agility is not so good for bear anymore, it still gives your dodge, ap and crit but the values it adds are rather low

Stat priorities change with the fight.
Ex. Stone Guard is primarily unavoidable bleed dmg and therefore mastery and dodge are much less powerful than usual and you should reforge to exp/hit/crit or as it's usually called, "full rage regen" and use stamina trinkets over avoidance trinks.
Feng, for example, does not do a significant amount of unavoidable dmg and therefore should be reforged for crit/mastery.
At the moment, unless it allows you to bypass a mechanic of the fight(Something like Decimation Blade) dodge is pretty lackluster since it takes far more dodge rating for 1% of dodge relevant to how much it did in Cata. I doubt we'll ever be reaching the 40%+ dodge rates of cata.

if only WoW had come out when I was a teenager. Back then online gaming consisted of text-based MUDs....I could type "kill orc" faster than any of my competition, brosephs, and played a mean giantman cleric.

I've personally been leaning towards stamina since we're very under-geared for the content, but I've also tried to gear towards good rage generation.

After clearing through the raid on normal, leaning towards stamina definitely felt good, but I do wish I had more passive dodge (currently using double "dodge on hit" trinkets, actually noticeable when the trinkets proc together). I always gear in terms of what will actually kill me, and so far there isn't much magic damage that I fear beyond Elegon's breath... although it ticks several times, so FR usage sort of negates its danger (especially when I was consistently getting over 500k FR heals). The only unavoidable damage is the bleed from the Stone Guard, so I suppose ensuring you have enough stamina is a good idea. Only fight where I felt severely threatened was Will of the Emperor, purely since they hit so bloody hard and had occasions where SD failed to invoke a dodge.

That's just my personal experience with my raid, however I still think you can clear the normal content regardless of how you gem/enchant. Some fights require different things.

When progressing in shit gear, Stamina is the way to gem - to a point. As in, I'm going with Agi/Stam and Dodge/Stam to get the socket bonus, I need every single dps I can squeeze out. I reforge into Dodge and NOT Mastery. Reason why, is that a lot of our gear (currently) has lots of Mastery on it and I'm using the 2x Stam trinkets from Coren Direbrew. So I want the Dodge from reforge, Mastery i.e Armor comes from the gear and then prio Stam. Combined with our self healing, this seems to be the best choice imo.

When progressing in shit gear, Stamina is the way to gem - to a point. As in, I'm going with Agi/Stam and Dodge/Stam to get the socket bonus, I need every single dps I can squeeze out. I reforge into Dodge and NOT Mastery. Reason why, is that a lot of our gear (currently) has lots of Mastery on it and I'm using the 2x Stam trinkets from Coren Direbrew. So I want the Dodge from reforge, Mastery i.e Armor comes from the gear and then prio Stam. Combined with our self healing, this seems to be the best choice imo.

Dodge is far too inefficient to make it a priority if there isn't some mechanic to bypass. An equivalent amount of mastery as dodge will result in mastery mitigating more and reducing spikiness. If the gear is mast/crit, it needs no reforging.
Also mastery doesn't have diminishing returns, it consistently mitigates damage all the way up to the armor cap(which we will never hit) while dodge already has very little return for the amount of rating required and it has diminishing returns.
These are normals and you are likely doing them in the intended 463ilevel, unless you're one of the guilds who'll be doing hard modes the 2nd week there is little reason to gem stamina since, by definition, you are not undergeared.

Though, the fact that you use both brewfest stam trinks makes me question you to begin with. You should be using iron protector talisman over a brewfest trink if you're on a fight where stamina is good. It's ~200 less stamina for a proc of dodge that is up 25% of the time.
Our self-healing also is only based off stamina in that it increases the minimum heal(which would mean you have no vengeance) and therefore does not benefit frenzied regeneration in any noticable way.

Fights with large amounts of unavoidable dmg, be it magical or a bleed like stone guards you reforge to maximize rage generation(hit/exp/crit) to spam frenzied regen.

if only WoW had come out when I was a teenager. Back then online gaming consisted of text-based MUDs....I could type "kill orc" faster than any of my competition, brosephs, and played a mean giantman cleric.

Though, the fact that you use both brewfest stam trinks makes me question you to begin with. You should be using iron protector talisman over a brewfest trink if you're on a fight where stamina is good. It's ~200 less stamina for a proc of dodge that is up 25% of the time.

The only reason I am wearing 2 x brewfest trinks was because I had a competition with a mate about who could get the most HP. I barely use one of the trinkets normally.

Well, if you needed a reason to push for more stamina for a fight, I think heroic Stone Guard is a fight where I don't think you can have too little at the gear level we can achieve currently. Bloody ridiculous (excuse the pun) how much damage a Guardian takes since we only have 12% passive melee damage reduction to help out against the fast bleed, where other classes have more passive melee damage reduction since we have higher armor than the other tanks... lot of good it does on this fight. While this fight may be an extreme of where dodge/mastery really doesn't help you much at all, except from the tiny melee attacks, it's a fight that does exist in our current raiding content. I'm sure other fights (*cough* heroic Will *cough*) will have the complete opposite needs that Stone Guard has.

On the plus side, I was my own #1 healer with FR usage doing roughly 38% of my own healing. Anyone else doing this fight get to the point where using SD just wasn't worth it over FR?

huge healthpools onyl seems to be prominent in lich king ( or at least notiably so) i mean towards the end of cata it pciked up a bit, but defo a mix of stam and agi was the best way to go IMO. Also it balanced with the fact that druids has about 10k more armor than other tank classes XD

Our self-healing also is only based off stamina in that it increases the minimum heal(which would mean you have no vengeance) and therefore does not benefit frenzied regeneration in any noticable way.

While it doesn't help FR, we get 4% HP every 6 seconds with leader of the pack, that scales with every HP increase. It's not a big help though, 10000hp would yeild only 10000 healing extra in 2.5 mins.

While it doesn't help FR, we get 4% HP every 6 seconds with leader of the pack, that scales with every HP increase. It's not a big help though, 10000hp would yeild only 10000 healing extra in 2.5 mins.

its not exactly every 6 seconds tho, its about 708 secodns becase you do not instantly score a crit when its off cooldown

Stamina is important, but only until some point. Personally for normals I found 500k enough. On Stone Guards HM fight I found myself lacking health pool and boosted it to 600k. Boosting it further didn't had any increase, so I changed to agi agi for better damage. Crit maybe better tho. Need to test.

Sims are very raw. It is only start of addon and very small amount of data was collected. I would be very sceptic when following sims suggestions. It is much better to go to the raid and see how your bear work and what do you need.

Stamina is important, but only until some point. Personally for normals I found 500k enough. On Stone Guards HM fight I found myself lacking health pool and boosted it to 600k. Boosting it further didn't had any increase, so I changed to agi agi for better damage. Crit maybe better tho. Need to test.

Sims are very raw. It is only start of addon and very small amount of data was collected. I would be very sceptic when following sims suggestions. It is much better to go to the raid and see how your bear work and what do you need.

Except the data isn't raw at all, beta tests have been run.
Something to remember with stam is it partially has to do with how attentive your healers are; do they let you drop to 40% then heal you all the way back up? Or keep you around 70% constantly? My healers are the latter so I ran Stone Guards with a little bit less than 500k hp, atm I'm doing Garajal 25M with only about 460k and doing very well.

if only WoW had come out when I was a teenager. Back then online gaming consisted of text-based MUDs....I could type "kill orc" faster than any of my competition, brosephs, and played a mean giantman cleric.